Testimony before the House Committee against HB 194

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A minimum wage is a government-mandated wage control that takes negotiating power away from workers and employers. There is a rare near consensus among economists that binding price controls distort economic activity, but politics often gets in the way of seeing the fallacy of a wage control. Setting a minimum wage floor above a market wage results in unemployment, especially for low-skilled workers. It also slows future job creation and pushes unemployed workers who would take a wage at less than a minimum wage into long periods of unemployment and dependency on family or taxpayers.